The present invention relates generally to the field of data storage, and more particularly to disaster recovery.
Disaster recovery (DR) is the process, policy, and/or procedures that are related to preparing for recovery, or the continuation, of a technology infrastructure. Disaster recovery is vital to an organization after a natural or human induced IT (information technology) disaster. Disaster recovery focuses on the IT systems that support some or all functions of a company or business. IT disaster recovery control measures can be classified into one of the following three (3) types: preventive, detective, and/or corrective. Normally, disaster recovery plans document these three (3) types of control measures and are exercised regularly by companies and businesses using disaster recovery tests or drills. Some of the most common strategies for disaster recovery and data protection include: (i) backups made on magnetic tape and sent off-site; (ii) backups made to hard disk on-site and automatically copied to off-site hard disk; (iii) backups made directly to off-site hard disk; (iv) replication of data to an off-site location which overcomes the need to restore the data; (v) hybrid cloud solutions that replicate to on-site and also to off-site data centers; (vi) and/or (vii) the use of systems that are highly available, where both the data and system are replicated off-site. Sometimes a business will use an outsourced disaster recovery provider that utilizes cloud computing/storage, rather than using their own remote facilities.
Active-Passive DR software controls datacenters/sites which operate with a backup infrastructure other than the production site. The backup site is not in use unless a disaster forces the Active site workloads to move to the backup site. Similarly an Active-Active DR software considers that two, or more, sites participate in Disaster Recovery with both the sites running production workloads. Each site shares a reserved infrastructure that can be used to accommodate other active site data in case of a disaster.
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a known way of doing business over a communication network. Providers of IaaS offer typically computers, such as physical machines, virtual machines, and/or other resources. For example, a hypervisor of the IaaS provider may run the virtual machines as guests. Pools of hypervisors within the cloud operational support-system can support large numbers of virtual machines and the ability to scale services up and down according to a customer's requirements, which will generally vary over time. Some IaaS providers offer additional resources such as the following: a virtual-machine disk image library, raw (block) and file-based storage, firewalls, load balancers, IP addresses, virtual local area networks (VLANs), and/or software bundles. Some IaaS providers provide these resources on-demand from their large pools of hardware resources. Customers can use either the Internet or carrier clouds (dedicated virtual private networks) for wide area coverage. IaaS providers typically bill IaaS services on a utility computing basis so that cost reflects the amount of resources allocated and consumed.